One Less Problem Without You Read Free Page B

whom she was barely in touch.
    Prinny’s mother had died when she was only six years old, so she didn’t really remember her very well—in fact, sometimes she wondered if her “memories” were memories at all or if they were just her own psychic intuition of what her mother had been like—but the one thing that everyone always said about Ingrid Tiesman was that she was the picture of dignity and sophistication.
    It was hard for someone who had been basically called a baby all her life to live up to that.
    Yet Prinny had loved her father hugely, so she never wanted to ask him not to use the affectionate term for her that was so special that even his tone softened when he said it in a way she never heard it change at any other time.
    â€œWhere’s my Prinny?” he’d ask when he came in at the end of a long day at work. Given the speed with which the maid would also bring him a Scotch on the rocks, in her earlier days, Prinny had never been quite sure whether his Prinny was her or the drink. But soon enough she realized, after he’d downed the first and asked for “another rocks,” which would appear as promptly as if it had already been ready and waiting to go, that she was the Prinny and the drink was … well, the drink was his binkie.
    In the end it was his poison. But that’s an old story. Who hasn’t heard it or told it or both? She lost her mother when she was six, she lost her father at twenty-six, and somehow, in the twenty years between, she’d never quite learned how to be a grown-up.
    People thought she didn’t know that, but she did. There was always a vague panic humming like a bad subwoofer under the weight of Led Zeppelin, telling her that the time was coming when it was all going to blow up in her face. She didn’t have it in her to handle the weight of a real, adult life.
    Her mother had died at the age of twenty-six. Prinny had passed that landmark with the full expectation that something magical would happen and she would suddenly understand all the little things she needed to about getting by, day to day, on her own and handling things like insurance, business, all the things her dad had always handled for her.
    Instead, her father’s liver finally cried uncle and he died, leaving her alone in the world, with an estate executor who was in charge of pulling all the financial strings in her life, and an older stepbrother, Leif, who, in the three years since, had been hell-bent on taking over her portion of their shared inheritance so she would stop “squandering” it.
    All of life was a game of Leif Says now. Fortunately, Alex McConnell—the executor of her father’s estate—didn’t seem daunted by Leif, even as the battle waged on and on, because Prinny sure was.
    Prinny was also pretty daunted by Alex McConnell, though she could never admit it to a soul. He was married; the picture on his desk of him and his beautiful wife posed in a typical beachy vacation spot proved that Prinny could never stand a chance with a guy like him. There were types, and he was a gorgeous, smart, successful, married type. And though Prinny had never met her, she knew the wife was the sort of gorgeous, pouty woman who always got her way, and whom a man would chase around the globe forever, just for the favor of her smile.
    Prinny would never be that woman.
    But she was in love with that man, and she had to settle for her time with him being business related. In fact, she had to settle for her life being business-centric. She needed to succeed on her own; she needed to be self-sufficient. She wanted to understand her finances, her investments, and everything she’d need to keep her going, even if she was alone forever (as she feared she might be).
    She needed absolute financial independence.
    That was the only thing that would give her complete control; the only lifestyle that didn’t care if she was a little insecure and a